Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played an important role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists provided an introduction to the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global stage. In addition to the exhibitions, a program of different activities expanded on the subject matter of the artworks displayed.
This newsletter invites readers to attend the course “China popular sin filtros (experiencias de un fotógrafo),”, to be presented by Rubén Núñez (1930–2012). The CAYC offered this course after having exhibited Del sinanthropus pekinensis al hombre nuevo de china popular (GT-79; doc. no. 1476280). The center exhibited an extensive selection of photographs showing daily life in China during the collectivist period in the late 1960s, at the time of the Cultural Revolution. The CAYC presented this course in an attempt to increase Westerners’ knowledge about the Maoist People’s Republic.
As part of his strategy to position the CAYC on the world stage, Glusberg embarked on a cultural exchange program with people who represented the cultural and art scenes in countries with communist governments. At the height of the Cold War, he invited artists from Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia to visit Buenos Aires. This event included photographs taken in China during the so-called Cultural Revolution, at a time when Western access to images and information from China was tightly controlled.
